


5 times Laurence Dominic fucked Adelle DeWitt

by themonkeytwin



Category: Dollhouse
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Post-Apocalypse, angst and plenty of it, smut practice, surreptitious farmhouse banging
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-06-15 11:11:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15411627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themonkeytwin/pseuds/themonkeytwin
Summary: What it says on the tin.The first time Laurence Dominic fucked Adelle, she hadn’t seen him in well over a year.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this 5+1 ages ago for self-assigned smut practice, so it's a bit uneven, and attempts to keep the feels, and the plot especially, to a bare minimum didn't completely succeed! But trying to get my writing in gear again and as a spur to try to stop fiddling and finish writing (almost there), and there should always be more angsty Dom/DeWitt smut in the world, so: I post!

The first time Laurence Dominic fucked Adelle, she hadn’t seen him in well over a year. She started awake in her tiny attic room – oh yes, the irony abounded – that afforded her the luxury of her own private space in this rambling, ramshackle farmhouse full of refugee souls of all shapes and sizes, and under her care.  
  
No such luxury now; she was not alone. She didn’t have to look, she _woke_ knowing it was him, a silent, brooding presence in the little threadbare armchair that sat jammed in the opposite corner such that you couldn’t fully open the door. Three years _by my side_ , striding in step from day one, and mutual betrayals to damnation; she knew when Laurence Dominic was nearby. She would probably always know, and a part of her hated herself for that.  
  
She stared up at the roof sloping low over her head where a skylight gave the room some dim illumination, enough to catch a gleam off his pistol. The comfort was, there was no vodka to lose. “I don’t even have any whisky left,” she completed the thought aloud, though hardly above a murmur, in deference to nighttime’s hush. “Put it away.”  
  
He gave a small, nasty laugh, before getting up and taking the few steps to sit down at her side with all the presumption of belonging there. Worse, her blood pounded its agreement, along with its fear; the dip of the mattress, the concrete proof of him leaning over her, eyes burning in the dark, the weapon loose in his ready hand.  
  
“But I really want to kill you,” he pointed out reasonably, the words taking on an obscene intimacy when spoken in the same low sleep-preserving tones as her.  
  
He might have the the upper hand, but he would not have it all his own way. Not this time. She sat up to give him her most withering look, trying to ignore the weariness gnawing at her cerebellum, and, worse, the frilly, old-fashioned white cotton shift that was all she had to wear to bed. Relic of the farmhouse’s previous owners, she didn’t need the flash of his eyes to know she looked perfectly absurd, and her chin lifted as if it could make up for her entire long-lost wardrobe.  
  
He returned her sneer with interest, pouring all that terrifying, welcome heat into her, so _angry_ with her. Her. Not Rossum – not Topher – _her_ , his own personal failed assignment. He continued, his voice remaining as soft as his breath falling on her cheek, dripping with disgust. “Oh, you think I wouldn’t shoot you? Have you _been_ out there? Seen what you caused? Or have you just hidden away above it all as usual, reigning over the last pathetic scraps of your kingdom from this rustic little tower?”  
  
She felt a spurt of annoyance at that, that he should impugn her house, slumbering and secure below them. He’d slipped past all of them to get to her, so he must know how easily she could summon them to her rescue. Tony was away; Paul, he’d likely scoff at; but even on the chance Echo greeted him as a comrade, there was always the wonderful threat of Alpha to scare him off.  
  
Yet Adelle didn’t raise her voice a jot above his, locking them both within the privacy of their feud. If they were finally to destroy each other, it would be theirs alone.  
  
“Come, Mr Dominic. I imagine you’ve wanted to kill me every day since first we met,” she replied icily. “I sincerely doubt you’ll ever do it. Follow-through has not turned out to be your strong suit.” She savored his little hiss at that, but couldn’t quite let go of his other indictments. Summoning the day-time assurance she wore for her people, she insisted, “And for the rest, yes, I have been out there. I have seen it. And I told you – we’re trying to fix it.”  
  
“Come, _Adelle_.” His mocking echo was vicious – yet still it sent a wild thrill through her to hear her name in his voice for the first time. He smiled cruelly, looking down his hawk nose – and still it brought out that beautiful dimple in his left cheek. She glared at him for her body’s hot unruly reactions, but he took no notice. He was too busy with seeing right through her. “Still? _Still_ , you poor, naïve little true believer? Working your madam’s tricks to help the whole _world_ now? Really?”  
  
“You told me our priorities had always been the same,” she snapped. It was that or claw his blue eyes red. “Will you help me or not?”  
  
He pressed his look of disbelief in close, as if searching her face from only inches away would yield the trick. “Send me to the Attic twice, then have the nerve to ask me to go back to being your lapdog – _twice_ – lady, you really are a piece of work.”  
  
“But you aren’t,” she said suddenly, desperate enough to try to get past the venom in his voice. If she had Laurence Dominic by her side once more, perhaps she actually could find a way to do this. She could – she _must_ – find a way to be strong enough to hold her people together. Because together, her people could do anything. “In the Attic. Echo _told_ me –” He made a thundercloud face, but if she could be put off by something like that, she wouldn’t be Adelle DeWitt and the world wouldn’t have ended. “She told me – what you were trying to do –”  
  
“Adelle.” His breathing had become hard, the warning clear.  
  
“– what you stayed behind to do! I’ve read your NSA file –”  
  
His hand, the one without the gun, closed on her neck. “Stop. Right now.”  
  
“I _know_ you started out, believing in a cause – you keep coming ba–”  
  
He squeezed; she choked off. “ _I gave you_ that, all of that! I’d have –” He clenched his jaw, but could only stem his violent _sotto voce_ outburst for a moment. “Everything you’re asking for, _everything_ , and you threw me away like I was garbage sticking to your shoe. And now you’ll look me in the eye and give me your sales pitch? What’s the going rate for a human being in a world circling the drain? What spiel do you have for that? Is there still time? Still a way to fix this? Go on. Please, do, tell me. Tell me. Do I have something to live for, Adelle? Will I sell you my soul for that song?”  
  
She paid no mind to her tear ducts beginning to water, meeting his eyes with all the wretched sincerity of every single spiel she’d ever believed in to give; without a second thought she used all that was left of the breath he allowed her. “I need yo–”  
  
He went white with rage; a motion brought his gun perilously close to her temple. “No, you bitch. You don’t say that to me.”  
  
Her eyes slid closed, the tears that weren’t tears spreading wet along her lashes. How very warped had she become, that his hand, his elegant, strong, _indomitable_ hand upon her, felt like the last of her hopes holding her up, holding up the weight of all this fallen world? She opened her eyes again, sure in the knowledge that he wouldn’t pull the trigger, but that even if she was wrong, it would be the kind of mercy she had never shown him. She lifted her eyes to his. “Plea–”  
  
With a furious, agonized sound, his mouth crashed onto hers. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a gag, but as he drove her back down into the bed it didn’t matter. Their foreplay had built for years; the mere enmity between them could not stop this now. The only thought she thought to have was hoping he disposed of the gun safely, and then his body was over hers and she was scrabbling frantically at his belt, couldn’t wait a second longer to have him.  
  
The sheets, his trousers, her ridiculous nightgown, any obstructions were little more than shoved and yanked out of the way; the only pause in their headlong rush into one another came from him, with a groan almost of pain, when he found how wet she was. Then he was buried within her, deep and brutal and perfect.  
  
He didn’t let her utter a word, catching her abandoned moans in a hand that tasted of her over her mouth while keeping up a fierce, filthy litany in her ear, half-mangled in time to the work of his hips. _Bitch – cunt – spread you – until you – your desk – every day since – fucking_ her to fever pitch. Taking everything, and she let him, wild to be just a body moved and moving to his, nothing but a collection of nerve endings rasping with the pleasure he goaded, mercilessly, until she didn’t know how much more she could bear and then low and harsh it was _**Come** , Adelle_ – and with a muffled cry, she did.  
  
He followed hard upon, his head dropping silently into the curve of her shoulder. He remained there only a few painfully sweet moments before unceremoniously rolling off her, staring at the ceiling. She would have thought her bed was too narrow even to fit two, yet somehow as he lay beside her, closing up his clothing, he made the space between them feel as wide as when she’d had him filed away in the Attic. Cold reality swept in to fill it, and she forced her body not to curl around its own flush, aching emptiness; allowed herself to shift only enough to restore some order – if not dignity – to her covering.  
  
She too could only stare upward, listening to their panting falling into step like some kind of dreadful punchline. The instant she felt sure of her voice, she drowned the sound out with the first thing that came into her head. “Priya’s pregnant.”  
  
There was a tiny pause before indifference sliced at her, “You won’t be.”  
  
It hadn’t been her point, but it raised some distracting questions. “You sound remarkably certain.”  
  
“Your implant is good for another – three years?”  
  
If she’d ever needed evidence that he had regularly practiced the kind of professional gossip that greased the job of underlings – particularly when one of those underlings was a spy ... yet even after everything, this one surprised her. “Dr Saunders?”  
  
“Judith.” A touch of amusement almost made his tone conversational. “I’d bring her coffee.”  
  
Damn him. “Two and a half,” she said pettily; it _was_ closer to three. Then she sighed. “Priya demanded to be rid of hers.” To think she once thought _Caroline_ to be stubborn and difficult.  
  
“Can’t say I blame her.”  
  
Perhaps not. “However, it does make life more complicated.”  
  
Quietly, so quietly that she didn’t know if it was meant as a reply to her or just a private thought, he said, “It makes life more like life.”  
  
He would never have afforded himself something like that with her, before. It set her cooling heart pounding again and shattered the crust of old, well-worn patterns that had begun to form on their exchange. She didn’t dare look at him; she only barely managed to pluralize the pronoun coming out of her mouth. “We need you.”  
  
Another pause, before his response came out as pitiless as anything in her memory of him. “I was NSA, not an obstetrician.”  
  
She did her best to speak as though her breath wasn’t trying to lock up in her throat. “Fortunately, between Echo and Alpha, we have that area of expertise covered.”  
  
There was a frozen silence next to her. Eventually he said, flatly, “Alpha. So it’s true.”  
  
It did not surprise her one bit that he had learned something of Alpha’s presence among them. She knew that thoroughness. She had relied on it, more times than she could count, a constant of her universe. Then it turned out he’d been serving a different master the entire time and Adelle had never had the faintest idea. “Echo has come to trust who he’s become, over this last year.”  
  
“Has she.”  
  
“I have come to trust ... her judgment in these matters, I suppose.”  
  
He sat up abruptly, away from her, swinging his still-booted feet to the floor with a thud. She watched the shoulders she had just been clutching, the tense shape they made under his frayed field jacket, wondering if there was any power in the world that could hold onto him if he got up right then.  
  
He didn’t. Yet. Instead, he spoke. “Enough to let him play midwife on her best friend. Adelle. Even as your traitorous and deposed Head of Security, I have to report that I have some concerns.”  
  
She sat up behind him. “Join us then, and voice them.”  
  
A tired snort greeted this bitterly.  
  
“Mr Dominic, ple–”  
  
“Beg me and I _will_ shoot you.”  
  
Though she couldn’t see his expression, it still chilled her to her spine. If she might have questioned the sincerity of any of the things he’d said tonight, she did not question this. It tore through the last shreds of guilt and uncertainty tying her tongue, gun be damned – he was right. She was Adelle DeWitt. She _would not_ beg again.  
  
“For God’s sake, Mr Dominic, it is the end of the world! Get over yourself and _help_ us!”  
  
He reared back, up to his feet, laughter seeming to crawl through him unbidden even as he looked scorn down upon her. He tucked the gun away in the small of his back, and added an impossibly sarcastic flourish to his obeisance, his eyebrows arched sky-high. “Oh – as _Adelle_ commands.”  
  
She could only look daggers as he slipped silently out of the room, resenting how his insolent grace never deserted him, resenting having no idea if he had meant those words or not, if she’d ever even see him again, resenting the scent of sex and the languor he’d left on her, in her.  
  
She still slept better than she had in years.  
  
When she came downstairs the next morning, her day-time face nailed down tight, it was to find a small crowd in the kitchen, Echo’s eyes sparkling at her over a blond head, her effortlessly laughing voice. “Adelle! Guess who found his way to the Island of Misfit Toys?”  
  
He turned and gave her a smile sharper than knives.  
  
  
  
\--------


	2. Chapter 2

The second time Laurence Dominic fucked Adelle, he’d been away for almost a month. Her eyes snapped open in the small hours of the morning to find he’d returned not just to the farmhouse but to her attic room, leaning his shoulder against the closed door, just staring at her, gripping the doorknob so hard she could make out white knuckles in the thin wash of light from the half moon in the sky.  
  
She wanted to be angry. Hell, she’d even take frightened, to find her space once more violated as she lay sleeping and vulnerable. _Anything_ but the flood of arousal, crying out for him between her legs again, even stronger than last time. Last time, desire had only had fantasies for fuel; this time it had memory and dreams and three long weeks of pretending to be as impervious to his presence as he had been to hers, until she was furiously happy at the idea of never laying eyes on him again – only for him to volunteer for one of Tony’s long-range patrols, and for her to discover with every passing day how much she wasn’t happy about it, not in the slightest bit.  
  
In fact, the only reason she was certain this wasn’t another dream she would wake gasping from was that he was still pressed back against the door, rather than against her. No dream had featured him holding back in any way. Even the thought of it nearly had her whimpering out loud, and she stared back at him, wondering what could have _finally_ brought him all the way back to her room but stopped him three paces short of her bed, of her achingly frustrated body.  
  
For three weeks, three _goddamn_ weeks, Dominic had been in her house and given her nothing but the occasional look or word, amused and distant. This, while he gave _Echo_ not merely all that cool, considered efficiency that had once been Adelle’s, but an entire array of heated opinions Adelle had never had an inkling even existed. More than once, when he would get in Echo’s face to make his point, unrestrained in passion and snark both, Adelle had actually had to take her leave or risk forgetting herself and ravishing him right there on the kitchen table.  
  
And for all his unruly attitude, he’d slotted into the war council without question, slouched loose in his seat like he belonged there and always had. He took Echo’s command of operations in stride, falling in shoulder-to-shoulder with Tony as though they’d already fought a hundred battles together, and finding a workable baseline with Paul with only the occasional roll of his eyes. He had a quiet mutual respect with Priya, and had found it within himself to spare Topher some measure of concern whenever their paths crossed; with Alpha, he betrayed nothing but too much of the whites of his eyes; and while he appeared to consider the rest of Adelle’s flock largely beneath his notice, he was at least civil to them. For everyone in her house, there was something.  
  
Everyone but her.  
  
Then, the moment his immunization sequences were complete, Dominic had merrily dived right back out into the wide world full of death and worse with a quip and a smirk and just one tiny blue flicker of eyes towards her that might very well have been only her imagination, and she could have _killed_ him for it.  
  
Now he was back, he was here, setting her absolutely throbbing with the promise inherent in his return to the secret darkness of her room ... and he still looked on the verge of turning that handle and walking back out as though he found it so fucking easy to live without her, without looking – without touching – without needing to get himself inside her every fucking minute they could get away with it. Well, she couldn’t, not here, not now, not any more, and not even the fact that she was still garbed in the least sexy nightgown the last century had devised could get ahead of her hand and keep it from throwing her coverlet aside, in the most blatant invitation possible that didn’t involve the words _FUCK ME YOU **BASTARD**_.  
  
He looked away for just a second, just long enough to send fears of rejection whirling through her. Then his resistance broke in a wonderful, wild rush, barely holding off long enough to help her kick out of her underwear and let her wrestle his jacket off; by the time she was trying to pull up his shirt, he was already pushing her thighs wider, tilting her hips up, paying no mind to her efforts and then she wasn’t either as he pressed in and it was so good, finally, _so good_ –  
  
Adelle let her head fall back, hooked her legs higher, glorying in the full weight of his lean strong body pinning her down, his steadily demanding thrusts, his face against her neck, the hot wash of his breath. She slipped her hands under the shirt she’d failed to remove, wanting skin, the dip of his spine, his muscles flexing as he filled her, easing the ache and driving it higher, so, _so_ good, until she had to get her hands under his half-off waistband to express her approval by squeezing, tugging on his arse, and –  
  
He didn’t react. At all. It made not one bit of difference as he moved, deliciously relentless, yes, but thoroughly controlled, silent, not raising his head, like he could ignore her _even while he was inside her_ –  
  
Without thought or care she dug in and _scratched_ , genuinely hoping she drew blood.  
  
Dominic jerked up hard, giving her a look of disbelief that was briefly comical – until she belligerently continued to score her point up his back. With a snarl he caught her wrists with both hands, pinned them above her head in his white-knuckle grip, and drove home so savagely it took the air from her lungs. Her eyes smarted but stayed locked with his, as inescapable and connected now as his cock deep within her, and it was all she needed to flaunt her satisfaction with a smile.  
  
For a minute, the only sound in her room was the harshness of their breathing as they stared at each other, until slowly he moved, until slowly she met him, an achingly long swell more lazy than she felt, making a provocation of her entire body. She watched as pleasure fogged out anger on his face until it remained only in his cold slitted gaze, searing down into her. And when he moved again, it was his pleasure and anger _at her_ swirling together in that drawn-out, deliberate glide, so intense that her breath hitched and the wetness at the corners of her eyes fattened.  
  
With her arms still trapped over her head there was nowhere Adelle could hope to hide his effect on her, how tragically deeply she needed this from him. She tried to hope it anyway; stared up into the silvery ice of his eyes in brazen defiance of the emotion welling in her own, and concentrated on fitting herself to his slow, thorough fucking, taking every bit of it she could.  
  
Not for her ragged people, not for the ravaged world, but for herself alone. His touch, his focus, his strength given over to her if only in this way, in this moment. Her hands burned under his and her body arched to take him and she couldn’t stop the overspill of a tear, a small quivering puddle caught by the ridge of her cheekbone, threatening to dislodge with every endless surge. It was warm, and tickled under his gaze. She had never felt more naked in her life.  
  
For a second, it seemed like he mightn’t react; that he might, just for this, make a merciful return to ignoring her. But his rhythm had already wavered, registering his distraction even while his shadowy expression gave nothing away. Until finally his head dipped down as if he couldn’t help himself.  
  
The hot wet shock of Laurence Dominic’s tongue at the edge of her eyelid, his mouth seeking this taste of her, the scruffy, warm nudge of his face against hers, ripped a broken gasp right out of her. She clamped her lips against the sob that threatened to follow, squeezing her eyes tight at the hopeless ripple of his sigh against her skin, the helpless way he nuzzled into her, until he gave into the slow rub of his cheekbone down along hers.  
  
It was no use. The instant his teeth nipped at her jaw, her whimper cracked her open, sounds so needy they put her tears to shame and he wouldn’t let up. He nibbled, sucked, scraped, licked as he rocked into her, unhurried, driving noises from her she wasn’t _capable_ of, chasing out every attempt to stifle herself, working lower until he could close his mouth over her aching nipple through rough white cotton, so gently ruthless in destroying her and this, this, was this what she’d done to him in that godforsaken chair as he howled and arched, as she’d taken him utterly apart because he was _hers_ and she _could_....  
  
With a despairing keen, she dropped her head back, weeping freely as she surrendered every last scrap and molecule of herself to his unmaking as he strung her out between loss and ecstasy. There was nothing, only this, only him, his fraying breath betraying his small, shattered groans, threading with hers, low fragments of his voice drowned against her pounding heart but which could have been her name, urging her, needing her, the inexorable rising tide reaching for completion in one another combined.  
  
It was a long time, Adelle felt, before she faded into the real world once more. Before she could understand his slack heaviness on her in the soft dark, the strain of her muscles, the feel of him half slipped out of her. A long time before she could lower her leg to ease a twinge and bask in the low, rhythmic flush of his breathing, warm on her skin and cool on the moist patch of fabric dragged askew across her breast; before she realized that Dominic’s hands had somehow ended up woven with hers, draped either side of their heads, fingers tangled, caught tight.  
  
It was far, far too short a time before tension lanced through his body, only another second before he was moving. A clumsy stumble to his feet as if he had poured every ounce of coordination he had into fucking her, spared none for backing away from her, frantically tucking himself in, snatching up his jacket, and it was only then (god it was only _then_ ) that she noticed he was in his socks this time. He’d left his boots somewhere downstairs, some small corner of the house that now belonged to him, to sneak up to her attic the very moment he got back.  
  
She opened her mouth to say she knew not what, but that was his cue to make a wild wrench at the door, vanishing into the dark with unsettling spy silence despite the state he was in. All she could do was gape at the door closed behind him and try to gather her wits, before giving it over as futile. She was empty, cleaned out; there was nothing to gather. For that night at least, she slept the sleep of the mercifully blank slate.  
  
When she saw him the next morning it was worse than ever. Not a word, not even the most distant notice of her as the others gathered, giving and receiving greetings, clapping him on the shoulder, happy to see him “home”. And all the while Adelle might as well not even have existed, standing there on the outside, shut out of the smiles and laughter, like some useless, discarded ... doll.  
  
When Priya passed him a plate of eggs, her gladness at his safe return was met with a squeeze of his hand, a warm flicker of his eyes over her bump, that nascent, sublime curve of promise and beauty she carried so well. When Echo peppered him eagerly with questions, teasing him about having his mouth too full to reply, she received a wink in response that Adelle considered positively indecent. When Alpha wandered in, scratching his stomach, and asked how the road north was doing, Dominic only swallowed, a little hard, and answered, renewing an ongoing discussion of a trip back to LA that they all knew needed to be made, and just as soon as they could figure out how to do it.  
  
It ought not stick in her craw, and she knew it. The gelling of her people around one another, banding their extraordinary, unique gifts together, was hope itself. It was exactly what she'd asked of him, that first night he’d....  
  
She lifted her chin; dwelling on her own needs was irrelevant and inexcusable, and she had a great many things to be getting on with today. The world grew darker and the magnitude of what they faced to restore it larger by the day, and Dominic standing there directing Topher to a sack of supplies and the sixpack of juice boxes at the top, an indulgent moment disguised as an afterthought, was every cause to rejoice.  
  
There was love collecting in this kitchen, somewhat bizarre in form perhaps, but binding and true all the same; stronger even than hope. She found it was possible to smile after all.  
  
And when Dominic finally got a chance to sit down with his breakfast, slouching into his seat before suddenly jerking up straight with a low hiss, shifting in what appeared to be an attempt to relieve some kind of discomfort on his backside, Adelle found that it was in fact possible to laugh all the way outside to her garden.  
  
  
  
\--------


	3. Chapter 3

The third time, Adelle felt neither surprise nor alarm when the presence of Laurence Dominic standing at the foot of her bed pulled her awake. Only the riotous, deplorable stutter of her heartbeat already reaching out for him.  
  
She sat up slowly, refusing to allow her arms to do the same. In the bright moonlight that bathed the room it was clear he was neither on the brink of murdering nor fleeing her. Just standing there, like a mocking, tiredly ragged echo of too many days in her office to recall, attending her decisions, invisibly doing his utmost to steer her away from ruin until she had destroyed him for it and driven the world to hell.  
  
He had been out in that hell world for well over two months, this time. He’d lasted at the house little more than a week, ignoring her with a thorny ferocity as good as hatred, leaving her with nothing but dully aching relief when he jumped at the chance of another mission. Another solo affair, undertaking a thorough reconnaissance of possible routes to LA and back; his insistence on going out alone was a point of contention that had ended within seconds, when Echo, Tony and Priya drew up as one to shut down Paul’s very sensible objections.  
  
That those three had been the ones to share the far more personal hell of the Attic with Dominic, for however truncated a period, had not escaped Adelle’s notice, adding yet another coil to the barbwire guilt in her gut.  
  
Also not escaping Adelle’s eye was how the raw sway of their bodies had reflected Dominic’s in that instant, something eerily feral. Something, for instance, like the psychosomatic residue of four people who’d banded together deep within one other’s primal neural pathways, fighting as a pack to survive. Imprinted.  
  
The question was not raised again. Not of safety; not, certainly, of trust. Dominic was theirs. With them, in it to the end.  
  
It was what she had asked – had begged of him, truly, even though he’d refused to allow her the words – and it was not his fault that she needed so very much more. It wasn’t his fault that the great and mighty Adelle DeWitt could be so terrifyingly inadequate to meet the demands of a half-failing garden, a more-than-half-failing Topher, and a compound of fewer than fifty people plotting to bring about the end of the end of the world as they currently knew it.  
  
It wasn’t his fault that she needed _him_. And yet, despite it being the very thing he loathed, here he was. Not only faithfully returning to their people but slipping secretly home, seeking her in her room.  
  
What neural path brought him to this – here in the dead of night, so against his obvious wishes? Was it some mechanism, some residue, some glitch of the psyche he’d forged out of the pieces that the Dollhouse – that she – had left him with? Was that all that was standing in front of her, Dominic’s body carrying out some twisted shard of neural code firing off, report to: _Ms DeWitt, ma’am_.  
  
_Then fuck her brains out_.  
  
It was an unbidden, demented little joke on too many levels and she couldn’t fully suppress her despairing spurt of laughter. The sound did, however, finally get him to move. His head tilted to one side, coming forward, slowly, sitting at the side of the bed where she shifted to make room. His thigh brushed against her hip through the blanket.  
  
He was without his jacket, this time, as well as his boots.  
  
There was no way to know what sequence of decisions, or glitches, might lie behind it, and Adelle wished she could believe it didn’t matter. That there was no real difference from the impulses and drives of any untampered human consciousness; that the sheer scale of violation of human consciousness in Topher’s “Thoughtpocalypse” rendered the point immaterial. That she was giving Dominic too little credit, that his survival of the Attic and the apocalypse both was evidence that he had patched himself together more than well enough. It was all very likely even true.  
  
It didn’t matter; she could not banish the blame for her personal hand in his violation. It didn’t matter; she could not absolve the moral bankruptcy of her snatching at this cruel scrap of all she so desperately needed, nor risk asking how it came to be offered.  
  
It didn’t matter. She could not keep her hands from pulling the hem of his shirt up, off.  
  
She was almost surprised that he let her this time, but then her starving eyes were devouring the lean lines of him, enough light to learn, at last, _at last_ , what he’d looked like under all those endless suits. More spare and wiry than he would have been, back then, those sharp, meticulous planes she remembered above his collar now broken up by shaggy stubble at his jaw.  
  
Adelle’s mouth parted, and it was some small movement in him that dragged her wide eyes back up to his, sitting there, watching her look at him. His eyes were locked on her face, on her transparent hunger for him, his breathing coming heavier. When she finally, finally, reached out and touched him, placed her fingers on the line of his neck and drew downwards, Dominic sucked in air high and sharp, eyes squeezed shut as he visibly fought himself not to lean into it.  
  
By the time she reached his ribs she needed both hands on him, feeling him, a little too hollow but so strong, continuing down ... and suddenly both her wrists were seized in vice grips.  
  
She tugged up in instinctive protest, but he was implacable, moving them down to her sides. His eyes raked over her face, down her body, totaling up some rapid assessment, and then released her just long enough to hook his fingers in the wide straps of her nightgown. Two yanks, one side then the other, a brief ripping sound as a couple of stitches gave way, and he had the sturdy loops down nearly to her elbows. The gown’s modest neck had become a frilly, ungiving band of 100% cotton around her ribs, trapping her upper arms against her sides.  
  
It was some consolation that, having bared her breasts in the process, he had to stop, frozen still except for a rasping breath, his hands still on her arms clenching with tangible need. More gratifying still was what it did to his breathing when her nipples drew hard under the combination of the cool air and his scalding gaze.  
  
The soft laugh escaped her before she knew it, and Dominic’s head snapped up, eyes still hot but hard as well, the spell broken. Adelle didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry for it when his mouth came down at the crook of her neck, a harsh caress that nevertheless was a bolt straight to her groin. She moaned, and when she felt that sharp smile against her skin she nearly squirmed with the thwarted need to sink her fingers in his hair and hold him there.  
  
He was holding tight enough for the both of them, though, and then he opened his mouth, latching on. She gasped when she felt his teeth, felt him suck, hard, found herself straining into the gentle burn of it, dizzy at the bruise he was pulling to the surface of her skin. Marking her, precisely where her collar would hide it during the day if she was careful.  
  
His mouth on her was becoming almost too intense and all she wanted to do was grab him and press him even closer. Keep him right there at the path of pleasure and pain he was creating, pulsing from her neck all the way down between her legs until she writhed in his hands, kicking under the covers with a little needing whimper.  
  
He broke off with a gasp, his grip pinching even tighter for a second before loosening, his palms sliding gently up, so warm and firm on her naked skin. His mouth was still hovering over his mark on her, before returning to it, softly, hands cupping the backs of her shoulders as he skimmed over the tingling spot with his teeth, in a caress that would have been unbearably tender if it had been his lips.  
  
Then he moved an inch or two lower, just below her collarbone, and did it again.  
  
She stifled a sound and found herself pushing into it once more, her hands lifting as far as they were able, her reaching fingers fluttering helplessly for him, his body, his skin. She felt Dominic growl at it, a savage jolt of memory: the last time her hands were free, she had clawed him like a wild animal. She forced her hands back down, fisting the sheets instead as she arched for his mouth moving another inch down, for the silky scratch of his beard, for the next suckling torment as he marked her skin with her blood, far more exquisitely than she had marked him with his.  
  
She could feel his breath on her, uneven, his hands curling deeper around her back to bend her to his mouth, his fingertips digging into her skin with a need that made her shiver. Her whole body was trembling, every nerve flickering with the fire he was stoking, fastening on the upper slope of her breast, then again, trailing over the soft flesh with an even softer groan before sucking hard, harder than any of the others besides the first until she was moaning again, on the verge of bucking where she sat in his hands when he moved.  
  
Adelle’s brain was so hazy with sensation that his lips closing upon her tight nipple took a moment to break through; then she _did_ buck, her hands for the first time trying to find a way to push him back, but he didn’t budge. She was squirming, little frightened noises in Dominic’s suddenly iron grip, trying her best to contain her panic, she hadn’t even _thought_ , how much pain he could inflict on her there and she didn’t want that, she didn’t want that even though it was only a brutal justice for him to hold her down and _hurt_ her, she’d done it to him again and again and –  
  
– and he was murmuring softly against her, _shh, shhh_ , lips and tongue loving her vulnerable nipple, so gentle, his hands rubbing her back soothingly, _sh Adelle, no, shh_ , the heat of his mouth and the most exquisitely careful nip of his teeth splintering through her, her hand finding his hip, catching at him with a desperate sob.  
  
His arm around her back tightened, the other coming up to cup her other breast warmly, tenderly, his thumb working the nipple in the same rhythm as his tongue, gravelly-low sounds of encouragement as her hand squeezed and jerked, digging at his skin as too much fright skittered into too much need and back again. She gasped and gasped; with whatever scrap of her brain left that could still think, Adelle knew Laurence Dominic wasn’t going to hurt her, wasn’t ever going to hurt her, no matter what she or anyone else could do to him, no matter what her guilt screamed she deserved.  
  
“Please,” she begged, mustn’t, she wanted to stop squirming and shaking but she couldn’t, so overloaded, “please,” wanted to raise her arms and grab onto him, he was so solid and real, but she mustn’t, mustn’t and she couldn’t even remember why, “please, please,” the only word she could think of.  
  
And then his hand left her breast and moved down, under the covers, under her nightgown, finding her, petting her, easing her, rubbing, pushing in, pumping slow, a rhythm as steady and primal as a heartbeat. On and on, almost more comforting than erotic, kissing and nuzzling across to her other nipple as she shuddered and settled and shuddered and settled into the tempo he was holding her body to.  
  
As soon as she drew a clean breath, the heel of his hand pressed gently over her clit and his mouth on her breast became demanding, not enough to frighten, perfect to rebuild the sensual momentum with shocking swiftness. She was squirming again, parting, lifting as he touched her ever more firmly, as he put his mouth to her breastbone just above the ridge of cotton and sucked sharply, another mark on her skin. It finally occurred to her, as he laid her back and used his freed hand to bunch her skirts high around her ribcage where he could lean down and add the next, that he really was blazing a path, working his way all the way down to his fingers moving inside her. He dragged the pad of his thumb directly over her clit, making her jolt, panting, rocking up into the next and the next as his mouth marked out stepping stones towards it.  
  
“Please,” she moaned, her hands rising as far as her shackled elbows would allow, grasping urgently at Dominic’s shoulders to no effect, unable to speed or slow his descent. “Please, oh –” shaking her head, raising her hips, all reason blotted out as his lips at last found her mound, “oh, oh, _please_ –” and then the very last gasp of awareness, “No!”  
  
It was startling enough to make him jerk, and she could feel him lift his head by the shift of muscles under her hands, knew he was looking at up her. Unmoving, while all she could do was moan another little _no_ , trying to drag her breath and thoughts together and failing at both.  
  
“Please,” she managed again, and then some fragment of her need for him, to feel him, to have him, _with_ her, “I, if you, if you – I need. Too close. You – in me, please – _oh_ –” That last groan was for the slow, testing swipe of Dominic’s thumb, making her shake, and she knew he understood how torturously close she was.  
  
Then she felt him lowering his head again.  
  
Her hips twisted, frantic, mindless, lost in anticipating the tremors of his shoulders poised over her, burying her fingers in his hair with no clear idea of whether to pull him closer or away. “Please, please,” she panted, waiting, unable even to open her eyes, to take even that much more stimuli. “Please, I need – I need – I need, _no_....”  
  
Adelle felt his hot, harsh breath against her and drew in a despairing moan, bracing herself to crash into orgasm. But his fingers remained still, and then his lips on her, something so befuddlingly chaste in his kiss between her legs, even as his tongue darted, a taste and then, with a groan, another, deeper, one ... and then he was drawing away.  
  
So fast that she almost couldn’t understand it her underwear was fully off and then he was there. Sliding into her, pulling her closer. Her bare breasts crushed up against his chest, every oversensitive nerve ending glittering with skin to skin, his warmth over her, inside of her, and she was already moving. Lifting wildly, hands on the small of his back as high as she could get, clutching, her body bowing up with pure animal need to claim what he was giving. He was meeting her, moving with her, whispering things she couldn’t make sense of against his first mark on her neck, sparking, kindling down the path he’d made and she with no choice but to catch alight.  
  
No choice and she wouldn’t want one. She clung tight, gasping for breath against his ear as he kept going, fanning flames on and on and _on_ until he was joining her in them. His body shaking with hers, silently, slowly subsiding together, until she felt the shift of him away and her arm shot out, unthinking, whimpering to find she still couldn’t raise a hand to stop him.  
  
“No,” she whispered helplessly, burrowing her head into his neck, unable to watch him leave her again. “Not yet, not yet. Stay. Just a little longer.”  
  
Dominic only paused before shifting further, carefully, just enough to roll to the side and keep her gathered close. She felt his touch at the strap of her nightgown, making to pull it up for her, but she shook her head and clutched herself to him, unwilling to lose even an iota of her skin against his. She thought she felt him sigh against her forehead, then his fingers, combing an errant lock of her hair back. “Okay,” he said softly, another stroke of his fingers at her temple before wrapping around her, holding her. “Okay. Just a little longer.”  
  
When she woke up in the morning he was gone and her nightgown was no longer askew, and she had no idea if she’d still been awake for either of those things. By the time she made her way downstairs she was already nervous, bracing for whatever reaction he might have to this latest neurological misdemeanor between them, but all he did was meet her eyes from across the kitchen. The look was disquietingly hard, and yet the mere fact of it meant she took several seconds to even notice that Alpha was speaking, asking how soon he could be ready to go back out.  
  
Dominic held her gaze for only another second before turning back to the discussion and nodding. “Tomorrow.”  
  
  
  
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	4. Chapter 4

The fourth time, Laurence Dominic had been gone for nearly another two months, and Adelle couldn’t have said if it made it more or less nerve-wracking that, this time, he hadn’t been out there alone.  
  
She woke to find him sitting at the end of her bed, not even looking at her, a motionless slope against the footboard. She sat upright in alarm, reaching out before she even thought, her hand on the worn dust-grit texture of his jacket by the time it occurred to her that her touch might not be welcome.  
  
Only a slight shift in his breathing indicated he even noticed. She clambered out from her covers to kneel beside him on the bed, ignoring the shiver of cool air hitting her body, looking him over anxiously. When a firmer grip on him went similarly unacknowledged, she decided her worry allowed for certain liberties in the situation and tugged him around, a hand on his cheek to turn his face to her. Her worry only subsided a little when he returned her look with dull exhaustion, before letting his eyes close, unmoving under her hands except for a deeper exhale.  
  
She didn’t know what she ought to do with this, but Dominic saved her the trouble when his face creased and he asked, without opening his eyes, “Priya?”  
  
She stroked his stubble-rough cheek, reassurance. “Doing fine. About to pop.”  
  
He just nodded a little, and folded against the footboard as though that had been the last thing before he ran out of momentum entirely. Adelle looked down, and her throat went tight; he hadn’t even removed his boots. Whether he had no objection to her touches so far or simply didn’t have the energy to express it, he’d got as far as here, to her, so now he was just going to have to put up with her.  
  
She got down and made quick work of his bootlaces, steeling herself for whatever rank condition his socks were likely to be in, only to find them surprisingly clean. Or perhaps not so surprising; she hadn’t spared it a thought in their previous nighttime interludes, but the fact was he was possibly the _least_ surprising candidate to remain fastidious in an apocalyptic wasteland. Since he was in no shape to notice it, Adelle didn’t bother to stifle the rush of ridiculous affection for the man, the muttered fussing she made over him, kneeling up between his legs to shuffle him out of his jacket.  
  
His limp cooperation didn’t change even when she started on his belt, and she couldn’t help a snort. Then paused, startled, at his deadened voice in the chill room.  
  
“What?”  
  
She looked up to find more attention in Dominic’s mostly-closed eyes than she’d anticipated, and she flushed a little. There was still something about him, quite apart from the tiredness, that was troubling – but whatever it was, it wasn’t hostility. So after a moment she simply voiced her thought. “It just would be right. All these years and I’m finally getting you out of your trousers, and it’s not immediately to ravish you.”  
  
A second passed with him just looking at her with that same lack of expression, and then with a quiet echo of her snort he closed his eyes and rolled fully back on the bed, allowing her to work the trousers down. She removed his socks too while she was at it, then gently bullied him in his shirt and boxers up the bed. By the time his head hit her pillow he refused to move any further, forcing her into an undignified production of sorting out the covers and herself over him, taking the wall side of the bed. She wondered if by now that officially made it _her_ side, if such a narrow bed could even have sides, as she bent over him and awkwardly attempted to tuck the blankets in, around his back.  
  
Dominic curled further in against her as she did so and she tried to swallow down the wave of emotion it brought on, but couldn’t keep from petting tenderly over his still form as she worked. She had imagined he’d be practically asleep by now, but he startled her again when his hand came onto her waist, a tense grip tangling the folds of her nightgown.  
  
Adelle slowed. He did nothing else, but she heard the tightness of his breathing, and she pulled back down beside him, worriedly cupping his neck, his jaw.  
  
She hesitated only a second; _Mr Dominic_ was plainly absurd at this juncture. “Laurence?” she whispered her concern, and saw his closed eyes squeeze. When he still didn’t move, she did, drawing him to her and wrapping her arms around him. She felt him shudder against her, face buried, his hand slipping further around her back, clutching deeper. After a minute, she realized the ragged shaking of his shoulders in her arms was not just physical exhaustion. He was crying.  
  
“Oh –” She pulled him closer, as close as she could, holding on with all her strength, feeling her own tears rise. She pressed her face to the top of his head, her fingers locked in his hair, and blinked them back ruthlessly. Keeping her voice low so he wouldn’t hear her tears or her powerless, roiling anger, she asked, “Was it Alpha?”  
  
It was hardly anyone’s _good_ idea that Dominic and Alpha together try to secure the route to LA, necessary groundwork for the team’s best possible shot of making the strike into the heart of the city itself and getting back out – it was just that no one could come up with a better one. Just the two of them, _clearing the path_ , no one saying and everyone knowing what it would entail, to create a window for the attempt to get back into the Dollhouse.  
  
For all Alpha’s absolute dedication to the cause – Echo’s cause – and struggle to become a better man – Echo’s man – he was still Alpha. Still a psychotic Frankensteinian monster, faced with an entire world of crazed mobs, and the task of keeping the woman he loved as safe as possible. God only knew what Alpha had done out there, but Adelle had known Dominic’s fear, and she’d stood silently by while it became clear that he was going to have to spend months alone with the very worst sides of him.  
  
She could still remember the argument around the kitchen table, Dominic’s maps littered with blooming hotspots. Dominic’s stony, silent face while Alpha pointed out the obvious to a frustrated Echo, that voice like sunshine through shattered stained-glass, warm and razor-edged: “Sorry, lamby-toes, but your delectable ass is grounded. That baby’s making its debut on this grand old stage whether we ever make it back or not, and one of us needs to be here when the curtain goes up. Let’s at least have the kid’s welcoming committee into this shitshow be the superhero, huh? Not the murderous freak.”  
  
“Let’s have it be both,” Echo said, jaw set, looking at him with the fierce blaze that lit him up through and through, demanding the impossible of him. “ _You come back to us in time_.”  
  
They’d done it for her in two months. Lying there holding Dominic silently crying, Adelle couldn’t imagine the cost. He’d gone out there with the closest thing their hellish world had to a true demon, wandering far distant from Alpha’s guiding light, leaving only blades in the dark. And Adelle, _damn_ her, had let him. Because they needed it.  
  
If it was possible, she held him even tighter. “Was it Alpha?” she whispered again, needing to know, what to add to her already-infinite penance. The rest of the world could wait. Dominic came first.  
  
Yet his only response was a small shake of his head, pressed into her, breaths coming deep.  
  
“Okay,” she murmured, kissing his hair, “okay,” not because it was or ever could be, not because she understood, but because she had nothing else to soothe him. “Okay,” kissing and stroking as his trembling slowly, slowly eased, wrung out little unthinking motions, calming under her touch. A tired nuzzle into her neck, hands on her relaxing, a sigh. A hardening pressure against her hip.  
  
Adelle’s breath caught. He was so _tired_ , she could feel it in every fiber of his body, how could he possibly...? Was he even aware? There was nothing conscious about it, nothing deliberate in how he held to her, and yet, that tiniest push of his erect cock on her body.  
  
She reached down, not really thinking to do more than check. She was not prepared for the harsh gasp that tore through him, hips lurching, his face spearing up against her jaw with a stricken sound. Him shuddering harder than ever when she stroked, following mindlessly when she pulled him over her, as she somehow got her skirt up and her underwear off at least one leg before guiding him into her.  
  
It was only a few thrusts before he was turning his face to hers, blindly seeking her lips, kissing her desperately, coming and still kissing until he couldn’t lift his head any more, slumping into her shoulder with a groan.  
  
She couldn’t do anything but cling to him, perhaps more shaken than Dominic himself. She was panting with it, blood pounding, stroking his back, unable to keep from kissing the side of his face, his hair, whispering nothings she meant with all her heart. When she felt his hands loosen and his body slacken she helped him shift just enough off her – in towards the wall; her side, she was silly enough to notice – and settle him down, their limbs still tangled. “Sleep,” she breathed, still stroking his hair, cradling his head against her. “It’s okay, you’re okay. You’re safe. Sleep.”  
  
The day’s first dim glow was coming through the skylight when the waking start of Dominic in Adelle’s arms woke her as well. She let go, almost guiltily, as his head came up, his eyes darting sharply around at the room and his position in her bed and in her embrace. He looked at her for what seemed a very long time as her heart pounded, the breath going out of her when the slight edge in his expression closed away, replaced by something sardonic and bemused.  
  
“Did I, er....” He looked down her body with a frown, evidently sorting through his memory. His hand was still on her clothed hip, where it had been when they woke up, and she knew as he flexed it lightly he could feel her still naked underneath.  
  
It seemed that her body remained stirred enough, even a couple of hours later, that its eager sway into his fondle was its own answer, and his head snapped back up to see her face.  
  
“Well,” she ventured, wondering how much he remembered and exactly how much she could actually explain, and saw his frown deepen, even further as her hips once more took it upon themselves to undulate in his tightening hold.  
  
Dominic stared at her as he moved his hand down, under her gown and slowly up the inside of her thigh, watching her breathing become correspondingly rapid. Her gasp as his fingers encountered the evidence he’d left, thickly slicking his caress of her sensitive flesh, made his eyes narrow. He did it again with the same result, then began rubbing, slow and continuous. “That can’t have been an impressive performance,” he observed neutrally, as Adelle’s head dropped back to the pillow, nails digging heedless into his forearm just for some kind of anchor.  
  
“Depends –” she said, trying to keep her whimpers in check and recalling the earth-ending passion in his kiss that she’d felt all the way to her toes, “– what you’re – comparing it to –”  
  
He froze, with a choked sound that Adelle only realized was a laugh when his face landed beside her, burying his helpless wheezing in her hair and the pillow.  
  
Her own laugh came jumbled with gasps and broken groans as his hand continued to move, only half-deliberately but pressed to her without quarter. All she could do was turn her face along his and curl a hand around his shoulder, her moaning breath against his ear. She felt him shiver, his attention to touching her picking up again in a hurry, but she could still feel the tiredness in him; he’d had barely a few hours’ sleep. She didn’t want to be selfish.  
  
She got as far as, “You were so tired –” when Dominic gave a growl in her ear.  
  
“Do not be fucking _understanding_ of my sexual inadequacies, Adelle,” he warned, still amused, but with that little edge back lurking in there somewhere.  
  
“I only meant –”  
  
It was quite remarkable how effective Dominic putting himself between her legs and into her was for derailing her train of thought. Every available bit of her brain went to processing the feel of him penetrating her slowly deeper, the way he was moving his hips, braced above her, the way his lips curled and eyes looked, grinning down into hers.  
  
Then he put those lips back down next to her ear. “Meant what, Adelle?”  
  
“Hmm– _ohhhhhhh_ ,” as he gave a long, long thrust. “That.” Somewhere, somewhere in her were words and a way to put them together, even though he kept moving, and moving, scattering and rearranging everything but she was stubborn, she could be stubborn too. “That – if your perfor-ohh, _oh_. –Mance, was less than – _uh!_ ” With the sharp second of sensation he’d given her she found enough clarity to make him pay. “– _Satisfying_ ... oh, _god_ –”  
  
She was well-primed and almost there, it would only take a little more, almost.... And he slowed down. She discovered she’d closed her eyes; she opened them, finding Dominic’s face so close above hers, and it was almost worth it. “Oh, you bastard,” she sighed, watching the teasing creases at the edges of his smile deepen.  
  
He eased until he had gone nearly still within her, then looked down, and she felt him gathering up her nightgown. “Let’s get this off,” he whispered, tugging it up, the gentleness in how he helped to work her out of it affecting her even more powerfully than the feeling of him staying and shifting within her as they did. She immediately pulled his shirt off, too, and then noticed his expression, looking at her pale, naked body under him in the gloom of pre-dawn, all the way down to where he was inside of her.  
  
He touched the crease of her thigh and she sucked in air, unable to do anything else, the slow stroke of his hand up her body, too lost and tender to be borne. If she let Laurence Dominic touch her like a real lover he would break her, and this time he wouldn’t even have been trying.  
  
“I really should get rid of the wretched thing anyway,” she said as off-hand as she could, a change of subject of sorts and the first thing she could think of.  
  
“Don’t you dare,” he said instantly, with a stern twinkle that was almost as bad, and then brushed hair from her face so artlessly it was ten times worse. And that was the moment Adelle knew she was fucked. He was going to take her heart from her, entirely, and she couldn’t – wasn’t going to – stop him. He lowered his body deeper on hers, skin and heat and weight, another long thrust, putting his mouth, his low lovely voice, back at her ear. “I am extremely fond of that nightie.”  
  
Adelle squeezed her eyes shut, and wrapped her arms around his broad, strong back as hard as she could. “You are?”  
  
“ _Extremely_ fond,” he said, beginning to move in her again, the slow build, caressing her, whispering, sweetly wicked things out of a mouth she had always suspected was hiding under all those bland _yes ma’am_ s. He built and built, right up to the edge and by god did he know her, too well, knew just how to press and when to back off.  
  
“Bastard, bastard,” she muttered breathlessly, “I never should have hired you,” but he just laughed softly and went far too slowly to get her anywhere but where he wanted, until it was time to start the climb again. Her heels were digging at the back of his thighs, her fingernails sunk in his shoulderblades but he didn’t seem to mind at all, so she bit him on the meat of his shoulder and he fucking _chuckled_.  
  
“Tell me how you really feel, Adelle,” he murmured, laughingly, and she groaned. Then groaned again, because it was close enough – and was not the catastrophic mistake of telling Dominic _how she really felt_.  
  
Then she began to notice the effect each sound of her pleasure had on him, the little catches in his words in her ear, hands gripping her harder, hips rolling deeper. The more she let him hear what he was doing to her, the more it frayed at his control, until she just closed her eyes and listened to her own frustration, pleasure, _need_ pouring out of her and he had fallen silent within it, fairly trembling with determination in each thrust. It was building and he was going do it again just because he could, and she couldn’t take it.  
  
“Please,” she whispered, not even realizing she’d kissed his shoulder until she’d done it, felt him shudder and kissed his neck for it, groaning against him. Rubbed her cheek against his, needing, pleading. “Laurence _please_ ,” straining into him, feeling his ragged inhale, his face nuzzling hers back, lifting to find her eyes in the growing light.  
  
Just looking at her, and then, slowly, so deliberately, so _inevitably_ , he put his mouth to hers. She didn’t know who sighed, maybe it was both of them, but it was her hands holding his face to hers as they kissed, as lips softly caught and pressed and opened, as tongues touched, teasing, tasting, delving. It was his hands pulling her against him, one behind her shoulders and the other cinching under her waist, as he moved in her, still unhurried, as she savored it, knowing this time he wouldn’t stop.  
  
They kept kissing until the last possible moment when their whispers had to take over,  _yes_ es and _oh_ s and open mouths dragging together in the slow-breaking orgasm rolling through them. Leaving them, eventually, sprawled around each other amid scattered covers, breathing deep, sweat cooling in the morning air and dawn’s fingers drifting through the skylight.  
  
  
  
\--------

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So ... yeah, I gave Alpha just a teeny touch of the Wash. *cough* Sry not sry.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been putting off posting this one for a while, even though it was finished, because I've been having trouble writing the final chapter (or anything else), and because this one is, let's say, an emotional cliffhanger. The final chapter is intended to wrap it up, but I've no idea when that's going to happen and get posted, so, proceed at your own risk ;)

The fifth time Laurence Dominic snuck up to find her in her room, Adelle wasn’t even asleep.  
  
And it seemed no one else was, either; the party downstairs was still in full, if muffled, swing when the careless sound of her door opening and closing cut through it, making her look up from her book with a guilty start.  
  
She’d been avoiding him – yet more irony for this farce, in which she’d been so unpardonably gauche as to fall in love with the object of her lust. After he’d slipped quietly from her bed with one last unbearably gentle kiss in the morning light, he and Alpha had slept like the dead for two days, Priya and Tony’s son had been born, and the team had finalized their preparations before lighting out for LA, all in less than a week. She had hoped, in the midst of all that, Dominic might not have noticed how she had barely ever been in the same room as him. Or noticed how, tonight, she’d left the party she’d helped plan for the team’s successful return and Tony Jr’s one-month birthday, after only an hour and a half of keeping careful distance from him.  
  
It appeared he had.  
  
The darkness of his look had nothing to do with the low lamp-light – a modest benefit of splurging on the generator late into the evening. When the team had arrived home earlier today, Adelle had raised her head in her garden to the strange sensation of him returning under Arizona’s unforgiving midday sun, to find him regarding her with the exact same forbidding expression he was wearing now.  
  
“Hello, Adelle,” he said, with a slight, nasty smile for her reaction. “Miss me?”  
  
She was a fool. A fool ten times over, and more than that, because this was going to be bad, and yet she still wanted it. Still wanted him. She couldn’t _stop_ wanting him, and in that week before they left – her wherewithal entirely taken up with Priya and Tony Jr, soothing Topher’s revolving worries over the team’s trip, and privately attempting to tally the compound’s manpower and chances in the event of the worst-case scenario – avoiding Dominic had seemed like some kind of solution to that. It had felt easier to need so deeply and not have him because she had chosen to stay away, than risk snatching wildly for every last bit of him and be dashed at long last to pieces by the impossibility of it. The one choice she could control. And now here he was, because of course he was.  
  
Adelle set her book aside, and did not look back up. Not when Dominic crossed to her, not when he pulled her covers right off, and not when he sat turned toward her on the edge of her mattress; not until he put a hand under each each of her knees and yanked her bodily towards him, leaving her on her back with a surprised squeak, staring at him with her nightgown rucked around her waist and her legs splayed around his hips.  
  
He only looked at her, flat. Dark. “Tell me to go, Adelle,” he said, his warm, callused hands sliding up her bare thighs, “and I’ll go.”  
  
She swallowed, holding his gaze, hoping her poker face was sufficient. Hoping he didn’t already know she could more easily cut out her own tongue than command him gone from her ever again. The shake of her head was miniscule, her voice not much less small. “Stay.”  
  
If anything, it seemed to inflame the black humor within him, and the need and hopeless love in her only leaped higher. Instinctively she knew that no pleadings would avail her tonight. She was truly at his mercy, and he was in a mood to devastate.  
  
Indistinct strains of music rose up from downstairs; she could always scream, she supposed.  
  
Her bitterness at the brief, facetious thought surprised her, then became a glare. This time, he didn’t have a gun, she was more vulnerable than she’d ever known, and _he wasn’t even afraid of Alpha_. The short interim between their coming back and going again had still been long enough to see that, contrary to what she’d assumed, his grisly task out there with Alpha had given Dominic an acceptance of him, a reliance between them in some ways. _That_ had stung, truly stung.  
  
And now this perverse man who had scowled at her invitation to stay smiled at her glare, left-cheek dimple dancing into existence.  
  
The scowl was safer.  
  
“Get on with it if you’re going to,” she said, lying there, her best bored British voice, and it did the trick.  
  
He wrenched her underwear down her legs, sparing only a glance for her nightgown he’d professed such fondness for. “Get that off.”  
  
Adelle did so with all the nonchalance she could muster, forcing herself not to make any move to cover her nakedness from him where he sat, between her legs and fully clothed. She felt little surprise when he knocked her hands away from his own shirt, only lay back again with a shrug. The hardest of it all was dragging her eyes away from him, fixing them on the rafters above her, a study in indifference.  
  
But she could only hold her nerve so far, especially as his silence stretched, eroding away at her. “I was in the middle of something actually useful about spuds,” she snitted. “I do hope –”  
  
It was no good. The instant Dominic touched her skin, even just at her waist, her body was absolutely humming. It would have taken entire sparring sessions with dear, perfect, figment Roger to get her this worked up, and then she realized what had brought that to mind, what it was on her body that Dominic was slowly running his thumb over.  
  
Adelle didn’t need to see it, revealed to him now in the lamplight, that two-inch smear of scar left by Dr Saunders’ patch-job and Adelle’s seething impatience. “Mm, yes,” she said, switching out bad hand for bad hand, playing carelessness to the hilt. “Poorly done, that.” She propped herself on an elbow, and allowed her fingertips to skate across the front of his shirt; she didn’t need to see under that, either, to know the long, clean stripe that resided on him, dead-center. Him sitting bound in one chair, his chest slashed open, his secrets tumbling out, and then another chair, his screams of terror and rage and the hot rip of pain below her ribs that had had nothing on the agony _beneath_.  
  
There was nothing to lose of it; she launched herself up and Dominic had himself a lapful of naked ex-boss, straddling him and self-destructive enough to find out just how much of his being nowhere but on top, in all their previous encounters, was a coincidence. Not at all, was the predictable conclusion, when she attempted to push him down and found herself immediately flipped onto her back, any deadly softness once more gone as his weight and coarse texture of his clothes against her skin pressed her, crosswise, into her bed.  
  
She looked up into his harsh face and smiled, so kindly. “... Though I suppose you never were going to manage anything closer to the heart.”  
  
She felt it all along his body, the slamming of his hand into the wall harmlessly above her head, his explosive frustration like a balm. When he snarled, “Shut up, Adelle,” nothing could please her more. She gladly complied as he slid down, put his knees to the floor, pushed her thighs further apart and without preamble got his mouth on her clit.  
  
However emphatic his demand for her to shut up, he didn’t seem bothered by her garbled cry, which was fortunate because she couldn’t stop, coming out of her skin, held together only by Dominic’s hands locking over her hips and his hot, wet mouth in place. She couldn’t think, could barely even _breathe_ , wracked by pleasure, lash after lash of it upon his tongue, joined by fingers moving into her, not letting up for even a moment. She couldn’t have said if it took seconds or days for him to drive her to bucking climax, only that afterward the sound of her sobbing breath filled the room and she was once more staring at her ceiling, one hand clenched in his hair and the other braced on the wall ... and he wasn’t stopping.  
  
Adelle had rarely been one for quick and dirty orgasms; for that matter, she’d never been one for sex she couldn’t control. And she had very little time – or patience, when you got right down to it – for the untidy surplus of _multiple_ orgasms, but Dominic wasn’t consulting her on any of it. The part of her that took one look at him and wanted him on the spot, that had placed her precious House, and herself, entirely into his hands, wasn’t consulting her either. The thing hit her like a runaway train, and her assent was merely a formality.  
  
Adelle screamed.  
  
She had barely recovered her wits by the time they were required to make sense of the sound of her name, beyond the door, called up hesitantly from the landing.  
  
“Bugger off or I’ll have your cock for compost!” she snapped out, ignoring the faint sound of a different masculine laugh and departing footsteps in favor of sinking back into an orgasmic haze better than any she could ever remember. So thick and deep it couldn’t even burn off in the blaze of angry satisfaction in Dominic’s eyes, meeting hers up the length of her flushed and panting body, the reluctant flash of his amusement, and she was defenseless. “Oh, my god,” she exhaled wonderingly. “I – _ungh_ –”  
  
It was slow, and even gentle, but full of unmistakeable purpose as he lowered his head once more, the hot ripple of pleasure through her and cold realization in its wake.  
  
Adelle had once thought the instinctive understanding between herself and Dominic to be extraordinary. Perhaps even unique. Even though that part of her which had thrilled to notions of the divine might, once, have prudently stopped short of naming their shared connection something sacred, the idea would have lingered. A quiet resonance evoked whenever she witnessed the Active-Handler protocols, proof that the Dollhouse had aped the very gods, captured their fire with science, wielded it with machines.  
  
But it was all lies, nothing but profane mockery, as he’d been the first to prove to her at such immense cost. Continued to prove to her even now, capable of working so well even with _Alpha_ of all people. Dominic was a spy, a chameleon; her Head of Security, so inconceivably in sync with her from the very beginning, was a mere role, a script he had tailored and she had followed, as blindly credulous as any doll in the chair.  
  
And this was nothing but another. She may not understand him even half as well as she had once believed, but she did know that he intended to apply his mouth to her cunt until he’d wrung everything she had from her, and then he would leave her here, hollowed out and alone. Defeated. Punished, in perhaps the only way he could do it.  
  
But Adelle had a chair to play, too, a script with which she could at least disrupt his. She dropped her head back, closed her eyes, and with quite unsettling ease let herself sink back into that role in her office, high above a world over which she had reigned supreme.  
  
“Well done indeed, Mr Dominic,” she began, cut-glass praise, and felt his startled pause. He remained still just long enough that she could press her hand on his head, guiding with a casual, “If you would...? Ah, yes, just there.” She stretched a little, a lazy stroke of her foot down his back when he resumed as if determined to ignore her. “It has been rather a trying day. But now here you are, quite the – mmm, quite the Johnny-on-the-spot, indeed. Of course, you always were so very good – at – attending to my needs. I – oh, mmmm. Yes, very good. I don’t – know why I didn’t write this into your contract of service – years ago, to be – quite ... honest....”  
  
She allowed her throat to release the deep sigh already trying to escape, made it luxurious, and lightly scritched his scalp while she regathered herself. “Put this mouth of yours to far better use, wouldn’t you say, Mr Dominic? All those empty _yes ma’am_ s, _no ma’am_ s, _three bags full, ma’am_ s, when I could have had you – doing –” Adelle met his eyes and frowned blandly. “No need to stop, Mr Dominic. I assure you, you were performing to your usual commendable standard.”  
  
His lips were nothing but a thin line, shiny with her, furious and aroused and _stuck_.  
  
She smiled, soft, speculative, and opened the next round by drawing her fingers slowly over her own skin, her navel, up to her breast, watching him trying to ignore it. Watching him fail completely when she cupped, squeezed lightly, began playing with her nipple with a little moan that she had no need to feign.  
  
“Would you have liked that, I wonder?” she asked, then. She let her eyes close for a moment, pinching the tight nub, grazing a nail over it, back and forth, her breathing roughening pleasingly on its own. Under her calves, she could feel the heave of his lungs, rising and falling. She opened her eyes again to find his locked on her fingers, his glistening mouth parting. “Me, sitting back in my chair ... opening my thighs to you ... over your shoulders, just like so. Letting you take the edge off for me.” She stroked her way back down her body until she was close enough to reach out and run a fingertip over his lips, enjoying how he couldn’t allow himself to retreat. “If I’d made you do that for me? All those late nights? Would you have gone down there on your knees and serviced me ... to keep your place in the Dollhouse?”  
  
It was a mistake, a sore tooth Adelle couldn’t resist poking at. “Let me use you like that – if that’s what the NSA needed of you? My god, what else _didn’t_ you –”  
  
“Yes,” he interrupted, hoarsely, throwing off her attempt completely even as he visibly struggled for his own composure. “Yes. I would have done it. I would have done anything.” He looked her dead in the eye. “But not _for you_.”  
  
She almost couldn’t breathe past the crush of bitterness. Somehow, she still managed to force sound out. “I knew you were my kind of man.”  
  
Adelle had never seen a sneer so ugly on his face. He wrenched open his belt. “And do you need me to fuck you now, Ms DeWitt?”  
  
No, no, no, she _should_ be screaming. Should protect herself. She should look at him undoing his trousers and play it with cool triumph, _No. That will be all for the evening. Dismissed, Mr Dominic_ , this hand was _made_ to win.  
  
And she couldn’t.  
  
“Yes. Thank you, Mr Dominic,” only the faintest veneer of command left, and then he was on her, bearing her back, down, halfway inside before the last of her mask crumbled entirely and he saw the misery she couldn’t disguise.  
  
Dominic stopped, unwilling concern, fury, sexual need chasing across his jaw before he dropped his head to her shoulder, hiding nothing, she could still feel it all the way through him as he sank in, joining deep. “Fuck you, Adelle,” he said helplessly, and she clasped her arms around him, moving with him, thrusts that were neither hurtfully hard nor teasingly soft, pressing into his touch when he reached down and got her there, one more time, with him.  
  
It was worse than she could ever have conceived. She’d take being hollowed out in that goddamn chair over this, curling up like a wounded animal as he pulled away from her, standing and doing himself up, his hatred oozing from every movement. The lightness of his tone was all the more vicious for it when he said, without facing her, “Consider my formal notice given, Ms DeWitt. From now on you’re going to have to have your other _Johnny-on-the-spot_ take the edge off or ... pleasure you or service you or punish you or whatever the fuck it is you’re doing here.”  
  
It was such a non sequitur she blinked, not quite able to not ask. “My...?”  
  
He snorted softly, resigned. “Fine. Your little boytoy-on-the-spot, but don’t play coy, Adelle. It doesn’t suit you. I saw you snuggling up with him today in the garden. Tonight, too.”  
  
It took a moment, because he could only mean Damian. Sweet, sunny young Damian who’d arrived at the compound some time back, a biology undergrad who had been working with her almost every day and who appeared to have undertaken it as a project to make her laugh, and often surprisingly succeeded; and she had indeed used him as a shield in avoiding Dominic tonight. Add to that her cowardly avoidance of Dominic after their previous night together, and something she’d never given a single thought to wasn’t such an unreasonable conclusion for him to have arrived at.  
  
“Oh. Him,” she said, feeling as if it were indeed a hollow void inside her speaking, heart thudding and empty, far away.  
  
Dominic was still standing there facing her closed door, one hand resting on a panel. When he heard what passed for an admission, he gave her a long expressionless look over his shoulder, then opened the door, and left.  
  
  
  
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End file.
